This is a sharp account of one serious Russian view on Russian energy issues: Mr Chubais has spent the past 10 years masterminding the break-up of UES, the Russian electricity monopoly, which will cease to exist next week after selling off its generators in the biggest liberalisation of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. His […]
If you have been beaten up by someone for nearly fifty years, does that ‘cloud your judgment’ about the beater? But however clear-eyed Lithuania’s decison-makers claim to be about today’s Russia, many seem myopic about their own country’s past. Anger over 48 years of Soviet occupation clouds their judgment about […]
Imagine. You fairly win an auction to buy a house. But having attempted to rig the auction the previous owner will not move out, and starts to attack you viciously when you come to claim the property. Most of the others living on the street and further afield are dismayed, […]
Should the EU’s atom-sized sanctions on Cuba be lifted? Why not? They do not matter, as they are a Silly Noise unattached to a policy. The debate of course is not about whether these sanctions make a difference, symbolic or otherwise. It rather is about whether the EU should have […]
The Belmont Club look at Michael Totten’s impressions from Sarajevo. This captures my attention: Sarajevo has largely recovered from the physical scars of the 1990s battles. The one thing that has changed — ripped apart by ethnic powerplays — is the easy sort of intercommunal tolerance of 30 years ago. […]
Imagine you are the Foreign Office in London. A bit of a wildcat in your youth. Yet still squeaky keen to show Relevance and Cleverness. Egad! An idea dawns. Let London lead the praise for the sybaritic delights of latter-day Western personal freedom! British Embassies should all fly the LGBT […]
This is a perceptive argument that B Obama has brought together the techniques of 1960s’ New Left/Marxist ‘community mobilisation’ with networked Internet cleverness. But allowing the masses to ‘own the campaign’ has been accomplished in part by letting all sorts of extremists (anti-semitic, communist, Jihadist and others) rant away prolifically – on Obama’s own community website! […]
Back in February I wrote about Communism and Nazism as the two vampires, asking which was worse. Ayn Rand back in 1946 through the words of Ellsworth Toohey, uber-collectivist, explains it all in a brilliant passage: Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so […]
Let’s hear it for the rock band which extols the virtues of: (a) Soviet Comunism; and (b) B Obama Doesn’t post-modern irony sometimes go … just a bit too far?
Rupert Cornwell in the Independent gives a glowing tribute to Senator Edward Kennedy’s life and achievements. Maybe he should have included his thoughts on the evidence from the KGB archives that Kennedy tried to work with the Soviet Communists to stop President Reagan being re-elected in 1984? A stunning story, so damning […]
